"Greg Egan - The Extra (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Gray wanted to speak to the volunteers in person, but knew that was too risky,
so he contented himself with watching tapes of the interviews. The psychologists
had their barrages of supposedly rigourous tests, but Gray preferred to listen
to the less formal segments, when the volunteers spoke of their life histories,
their political and religious beliefs, and so on - displaying at least as much
consistency across the transplant as any person who is asked to discuss such
matters on two separate occasions.
The three failures were difficult to characterise. They too learnt to use their
new bodies, to walk and talk as proficiently as the others, but they were
depressed, withdrawn, and uncooperative. No physical difference could be found -
scans showed that their grafted tissue, and the residual portions of their
Extra's brain, had forged just as many interconnecting pathways as the brains of
the other volunteers. They seemed to be unhappy with a perfectly successful
result - they seemed to have simply decided that they didn't want younger
bodies, after all.
Gray was unconcerned; if these people were disposed to be ungrateful for their
good fortune, that was a character defect that he knew he did not share. He
would be utterly delighted to have a fresh young body to enjoy for a while -
before setting out to wreck it, in the knowledge that, in a decade's time, he
could take his pick from the next batch of Extras and start the whole process
again.
There were "failures" amongst the Extras as well, but that was hardly
surprising - the creatures had no way of even beginning to comprehend what had
happened to them. Symptoms ranged from loss of appetite to extreme,
uncontrollable violence; one Extra had even managed to batter itself to death on
a concrete floor, before it could be tranquillised. Gray hoped his own Extra



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would turn out to be well-behaved - he wanted his old body to be clearly
sub-human, but not utterly berserk - but it was not a critical factor, and he
decided against diverting resources towards the problem. After all, it was the
fate of his brain in the Extra's body that was absolutely crucial; success with
the other half of the swap would be an entertaining bonus, but if it wasn't
achieved, well, he could always revert to cremation.
Gray scheduled and cancelled his transplant a dozen times. He was not in urgent
need by any means - there was nothing currently wrong with him that required a
single new organ, let alone an entire new body - but he desperately wanted to be
first. The penniless volunteers didn't count - and that was why he hesitated:
trials on humans from those lower social classes struck him as not much more
reassuring than trials on Extras. Who was to say that a process that left a
rough-hewn, culturally deficient personality intact, would preserve his own
refined, complex sensibilities? Therein lay the dilemma: he would only feel safe
if he knew that an equal - a rival - had undergone a transplant before him, in
which case he would be deprived of all the glory of being a path-breaker. Vanity
fought cowardice; it was a battle of titans.
It was the approach of Sarah Brash's court case that finally pushed him into